“Got the patient all ready, you say? Good, good; save time. Lunching down town today. Had lunch yourself?”
“No, Doctor. But the patient is a—”
“Daresay not,” the specialist agreed. “Plenty of time, though.” He turned briskly toward a curtained exit, but Dr. Alford took his arm firmly but courteously and halted him. Old Bayard was reading the paper. Miss Jenny was watching them with cold and smoldering disapproval
“Mrs. Du Pre, Colonel Sartoris,”Dr. Alford said, “this is Dr. Brandt. Colonel Sartoris is your p—”
“How d’ye do? How d’ye do?” the specialist said affably. “Come along with the patient, eh? Daughter? Granddaughter?” Old Bayard looked up.
“What?” he said, cupping his ear, and found the specialist staling at his face with abrupt interest.
“What’s that on your face?” he demanded, jerking his hand forth and touching the blackened scabby excrescence. When he did so, the thing came off in his fingers, leaving on old Bayard’s withered but unblemished cheek a round spot of skin rosy and fair as anybaby’s.
On the train that evening old Bayard, who had sat for a long time in deep thought, spoke suddenly.
“Jenny, what day of the month is this?”
“The ninth,” Miss Jenny answered. “Why?”
Old Bayard sat for a while longer. Then he rose. “Think I’ll go up and smoke a cigar,” he said. “Ireckon a little tobacco won’t hurt me, will it, Doctor?”
Three weeks later they got a bill from the specialist for fifty dollars. “Now I know why he’s so well known,” Miss Jenny said acidly. Then to old Bayard: “You’d better thank your stars it wasn’t your hat he lifted off.”
Toward Dr. Alford her manner is fiercely and belligerently protective; to old man Falls she gives the briefest and coldest nod and sails on with her nose in air; but to Loosh Peabody she does not speak at all.
8
She passed from the fresh, hot morning into the cool hall, where Simon uselessly and importantly proprietorial with a duster, bobbed his head to her. “Dey done gone to Memphis today,” he told her, “but Mist’ Bayard waitin’ fer you. Walk right up, missy.”
“Thank you,” she said, and she went on and mounted the stairs and left Mm busily wafting dust from one surface to another and then back again. The stairs curved onward into the upper hall and she mounted into a steady drift of air that blew through the open doors at the end of the hall; through these doors she could see a segment of blue dissolving lulls and salt-colored sky. At Bayard’s door she stopped and stood there for a time, clasping the book to her breast.
The house, despite Simon’s activity in the hall below, was a little portentously quiet, without the reassurance of Miss Jenny’s bustling presence and the cold ubiquity of her scolding. Faint sounds reached her from far away—out-of-doors sounds whose final drowsy reverberations drifted into the house on thevivid July air; sounds too somnolent and remote to the away.
But from the room before her no sound came at all Perhaps he was asleep; and the initial impulse—her given word, and the fortitude of her desperate heart which had enabled her to come out despite Miss Jenny’s absence—having served its purpose and deserted her, she stood just without the door, hoping that he was asleep, that he would sleep all day. Thus she found that she could still hope, and found in this fact a thin and derisive amusement.
But she would have to enter the room in order to find out if he slept, so she touched her hands to her face, as though by that she would restore to it its wonted serene repose for him to see, and entered.
“Simon?” Bayard said, having felt her presence through that sharpened sixth sense of the sick He lay onhis back, his hands beneath his head, gazing out the window, and she paused again just inside the door. At last; roused by her silence, he turned his head and Jus bleak gaze. “Well, I’ll be damned. I didn’t believe you’d come out today.”
“Yes,” she answered. “How do you feel?”
“Not after the way you sit with one foot in the hall all the time Aunt Jenny’s out of the room,” he continued. “Did she make you come out?”
“She asked me to come out. She doesn’t want you tobe alone all day, with just Simon in the house. Do you feel better today?”
“So?” he drawled. “Won’t you sit down, then?” She crossed to where her customary chair had been moved into a corner and drew it across the floor. He lay with his head cradled in his hands, watching her as she turned the chair about and seated herself. “What do you think about it?”
“About what?”
“About coming out to keep me company?”
“I’ve brought a new book,” she said evasively: “One H—one I just got. I hope you’ll like this one.”
“I hope so,” he agreed, but without conviction. “Seems like I’d like one after a while, doesn’t it? But what do you think about coming out here today?”
“I don’t think a sick person should be left alone with just negroes around. The name of this one is—”
“Why not send a nurse out, then? No use your coming, way out here.” She met his gaze at last, with her grave desperate eyes. “Why do you come, when you don’t want to?” he persisted.
“I don’t mind,” she answered hopelessly. She freed her gaze with an effort and opened the book. “The name of this one is—”
“Don’t,” he interrupted. “I’ll have to listen to that damn thing all day. Let’s talk a while.” But she presented him now the dark crown of her head, and her hands were motionless upon the book on her knees. “What makes you afraid to talk to me?” he demanded.
“Afraid?” she repeated, with her head bent above the book. “Had you rather I’d go?”
“What? No, dammit. I want you to be human for one time and talk to me. Come over here.” She would not
